This Is News
Neural Viz · 2025-05-11 · ai-made · 629,580 views
Made by AI
Model: Runway Act-One, Sora, Kling · Series: Landmark AI video (2023-2025)
Evidence: Description lists 'Made with: Runway Act One, Sora, Kling' and 'Written, directed, edited, and performed by me'.
Human role: Josh Wallace Kerrigan writes, directs, edits and performs all characters (Act-One maps his performance onto AI characters).
Pipeline: Human performance → Runway Act-One → Sora/Kling shots → edit
Lore: monoverse
What's in the video
Description written by Gemini, which watched and listened to the whole video.
Summary
"This Is News" is an AI-generated satirical sketch by Neural Viz presented in the style of a vintage 1980s/1990s local television news broadcast. Anchored by "Danley," the broadcast cycles through absurd, catastrophic reports and cutaways to correspondents whose names and appearances spoof prominent celebrities.
What is shown
- [00:00] Studio anchor Danley opens with a breaking report banner reading "EVERYTHING IS BAD."
- [00:07] Live remote with correspondent "Tomly Crooze" standing outside a government building reporting imminent universal danger.
- [00:15] Breaking news banner update: "ALL CHILDREN HAVE EXPLODED."
- [00:20] Live report from "Olivialy Rodreego" listening to "the sound of us slowly dying."
- [00:39] Senior correspondent "Nickily Menodge" displays a downward-trending line graph with no labels or axis values.
- [00:48] Airborne reporter "Timothly Shallamae" speaks from a helicopter he mistook for a "weird car," panicked by seeing the world from above.
- [01:01] Parody personal injury attorney commercial featuring "Tedly" offering legal representation for exploded children (call "555-CALL-TEDLY").
- [01:16] Sports segment with "Morganly Freemunn" preemptively denying upcoming documented allegations before concluding with "Knicks take it by two."
- [01:38] Weather check with "Frankly Sinatra," who simply states "It's everywhere."
- [01:42] Upcoming teaser: a story about a water-skiing cat that drowns.
- [01:46] Closing title card for @NEURALVIZ with a call to join their Patreon.
Claims & numbers
- The commercial displays and recites the telephone number: "555-CALL-TEDLY" [01:11].
- Morganly Freemunn states: "Knicks take it by two" [01:35].
- (Note: All claims in the video are comedic, fictional satire).
Notable quotes
- [00:07] Tomly Crooze: "We're all in danger, Danley."
- [00:25] Olivialy Rodreego: "That's the sound of us slowly dying, can you hear it?"
- [01:29] Morganly Freemunn: "You should believe me and not their solid evidence."
Assessment
This is a purely comedic, satirical creative piece rather than a product demonstration or real news broadcast. The video uses AI voice synthesis, image generation, and lip-sync animation composited inside retro broadcast graphics and CRT/VHS filters.
Lyrics & themes
The sketch parodies sensationalist local TV news culture and existential dread through deadpan, escalating surrealism:
- Existential Doom: News reporting that "Everything is bad" and children have spontaneously exploded: "It's just as terrible as you imagined, and probably worse" [00:02].
- Nihilistic Despair: Olivialy refuses to disclose her location and claims the ambient silence is "the sound of us slowly dying" [00:25].
- Preemptive Denial: Freemunn uses sports airtime to run defense against imminent investigations: "Whatever you hear about me in the next 24 hours is completely false" [01:20].
- Tragic Fluff: The classic heartwarming animal news teaser turned grimly tragic: "A cat learns how to water ski and then drowns" [01:43].
Lore & references
- Celebrity Name Puns: Every correspondent is an uncanny caricature of a celebrity with the suffix "-ly" added to their first name: Tom Cruise ("Tomly Crooze"), Olivia Rodrigo ("Olivialy Rodreego"), Nicki Minaj ("Nickily Menodge"), Timothée Chalamet ("Timothly Shallamae"), Morgan Freeman ("Morganly Freemunn"), and Frank Sinatra ("Frankly Sinatra").
- Local News Formats: Parodies local news station tropes (e.g., "Channel 12", "Eye in the Sky", lower-third breaking news chyrons, and ambulance-chasing daytime attorney commercials).
Visual style & craft
The piece emulates an authentic 4:3 standard-definition videotape broadcast, complete with chromatic aberration, VHS tracking jitter, scanlines, and period-accurate serif typography. The talking heads are generated via AI portrait generation combined with neural facial animation/lip-syncing software to fit synthesized voices, then edited into multi-box broadcast layouts and interstitials by a human editor.
Described by gemini-3.8-flash on 2026-09-29 from the video's audio and frames.